Market 3

Introducing a new level of simplicity to the Market theme for WordPress. Market 3.

Market 3 is an entirely new engineered version of the popular e-commerce theme for WordPress. Market makes running a blog and a storefront extremely easy, and Market 3 takes the level of simplicity even farther. Designed and developed by Astereostudio, an experienced WordPress user and theme designer, you are getting a high quality premium theme loaded with features.

The changes and improvements with Market 3 can be found in both the backend and frontend. First, you will notice an entirely new layout - one that promotes the use of a blog alongside of the storefront interface. In earlier versions of Market, the normal blog functionality was basically stripped out. In Market 3, it has returned and is now displayed by default. Still want to focus on just store items and not on a blog? Use the "Storefront" template to create a new page and set it as the static homepage in the WordPress options panel to return Market 3 to its former grid based glory.

Improvements and new features include the following:

Entirely New Layout [Frontend] - A two column layout with a widgetized sidebar. Shows all normal posts on the left column and the latest 15 products on the right while on the homepage. On all inner pages and normal posts, you will see the widgetized sidebar on the right side. The individual product page has its own layout.

Buy Now and Add to Cart [Frontend] - Now the buy now and add to cart buttons will display side by side. No longer do you have to edit code or download a different version to get one or the other. Don't want to have the add to cart option or a straight up buy now button? Simply remove the form in single.php - it is plenty easy enough to find.

Dynamic Price [Frontend] - One of the requests I heard many times in the forums was what if you only have a few of a certain item, and that item sold out. Obviously you do not want a buy now or add to cart button there if there are no copies of your item left. Now when you remove the price from your item, the buy now / add to cart buttons will no longer display. But the items will still be listed as products. You will not have to delete the whole post.

Market Product Manager [Backend] - The Market Product Manager plugin, developed by John of Simply-Basic, makes adding products a cinch. Using javascript, image uploads are as simple as browsing to the image and clicking upload. The custom field data is set and saved for you. You can set the price, additional specs, and even color and size options from a new "Add Product" page from your dashboard. It is very self-explanatory and hands on. Beyond adding products, the plugin also gives you a nice "manage products" tab which will show you the item price, additional specs, and if a main product image and additional product images have been set, just like the normal manage posts section of the dashboard. Plus, the Market Product Manager works with any version of Market. Even if you wish to use an old version, the plugin will still work.

Current Market theme owners can grab the plugin and the new version of Market from the download center. Market 3 is now the default version that the main download link will link to. All the previous versions are still available in the download center. If you have set to purchase the theme, why not purchase a license now? At just $55, it is extremely affordable and worth it. If you have any questions, please use the support forum to ask them. I will gladly answer as many as I can.

Over the next few days I will be adding new information to the product tour page and hopefully a new tour video as well, highlighting what is new with Market 3. For now, take a look at some of the full screenshots below. (click the thumbnail to open a lightbox version of the image. Then click on the expand arrow to see the full original image size.)